


Sixth Star

by cyclical



Series: Heavenly Bodies [1]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, GRAPHIC DEPICTION OF BLOOD AND GORE, Genre-Typical Violence, M/M, Mental Instability, Military Science Fiction, Non-Linear Narrative, Physical Disability, Psychosis, ft. kunimi the space assassin, the rest is somewhere between cyberpunk and space opera
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:13:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27980559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyclical/pseuds/cyclical
Summary: “Tooru, Tooru, look,” Iwaizumi said, as impatiently as he could. “It’s shifting. I thought—down there, I thought it was a malform, but I didn’t have time to check—”Oikawa took the sphere from him. It trilled light and lovely. Codebits revolved around its glass core. There was a band of silver that crossed its midline, splitting it into uneven thirds. Even to Kunimi’s technologically obtuse eye, it was truly and undeniably beautiful, because it looked exactly like an apparatus that Kageyama Tobio had built.
Relationships: Kageyama Tobio/Kunimi Akira
Series: Heavenly Bodies [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2090799
Comments: 6
Kudos: 34





	Sixth Star

**Author's Note:**

> **warnings:**  
>  \+ graphic depiction of gore  
> \+ graphic depiction of psychosis  
> \+ brief description of mutilation  
> \+ past torture (reference)  
> \+ ableism / physical abuse  
> \+ violence / blood / death  
> \+ assassination(s)
> 
> this is rated M solely for thematic reasons not for sex LOL
> 
> [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4R5PKaEbG4zzokXjwiZgpP?si=fou3ruB9TQSWLOgli9g7LA) (thank you very much elo for making this for me)

_:: four myriad before the tour finishes and I’m scheduled to head back for off-term::I’m sorry I didn’t set up the cam this time around, but good news is that the packet will get to your place in a reasonable amount of time::I mean, compared to what it’s usually like::I can hear you complaining at the screen::you know, recon isn’t my favorite either; Luster belt is so goddamn far away from everything::no ration refuels, I’ve been eating gaseous shit for weeks, Kunimi, it’s almost as bad as having to see Oikawa’s face every::_

Kunimi worked the crowd. It was not easy. They fought, but they always did, and he had both weapons and experience and also the mother of all time limits clogging the corner of his lenses; Kunimi ignored it, as much as he could ignore Kindaichi’s haggling over the comms, and dove back under.

Kunimi’s job (beyond the beautiful and very nasty bylines it gave his CV) was best described as a two-pronged stratagem—a painstakingly developed procedure that necessitated both tether and offhand to commit themselves to the datastream, unless they fancied their consciousness to be ripped from their bodies and drowned in the infoload that stretched the dam a brain from its limits every time Kunimi plugged in.

Unfortunately, Kindaichi was prone to anxiety. Honestly speaking, it was a habit that Kunimi was intimately familiar with, but only made it harder for him not to grind his teeth down to stubs while doing a fucking _float-and-rescue_ while a grossly over-competent squadron senior babysat them from the handler’s chair, as sadly even their best offhand was trusted only as far as he could be thrown, which was actually as far as _Kindaichi_ could be thrown. And for him in the stream, was not very far. To the board’s chagrin, the water kept spitting him back out.

Kindaichi wired him another set of coordinates. They came inappropriately fast, which told Kunimi that he really should consider counter in his field of vision defunct. He estimated fifteen, maybe sixteen more minutes before Kindaichi’s nerve broke and he was yanked of the datastream regardless of whether or not he’d finished the job.

So Kunimi took a left, insofar as cardinal directions mattered in the interface, swatting aside the securityware that came at him from around the corner, and fantasized about all the ways he might tell Kindaichi off once he came up for air. Something like— _any time you decide you’d like to settle the fuck down and get over that ill-advised crush you’ve still got on the commander that’d be great, because without both your asscheeks in the pilot’s module, I’m at any given moment vulnerable to being torn apart by the vicious amalgamation of tens of thousands of technological interfaces that sense me as malicious anima and hunger for my soulless flesh,_ et cetera, et cetera.

It was a fantasy that distracted him enough from the sheer boring sameness of the stream he was walking, and meant that he’d secured the down-low of mission parameters even before Kindaichi could hurry him along in that habitual and useless way of his. The one with lots of hand-wringing. Kunimi never had the displeasure to see it with his own eyes, but the team assured him that it was a rather very pathetic look on him.

“Hey, Yuutaro,” Kunimi said, prodding at a loose datatile with his foot. “I got the packet in eyeline. You wanna see what’s up?”

A crackle over the line. “Yeah, uh, hold on,” Kindaichi said. There was a smattering of noises before an unholy amount of data glitched out Kunimi’s lenses. “Hm,” he said, then paused.

Kunimi raised an eyebrow. “Hm?” he asked.

The analytics reconfigured. Kindaichi introduced a new program—Kunimi usually didn’t bother with the details of tech work, though he did get a feel for the rhythm of things three years into a career as Seijoh’s offhand—which meant that mission objective was more interesting than Iwaizumi had let on during briefing. Oikawa’s prerogative, if Kunimi had a guess. Personally, he had mixed feelings about the man’s command style, but Kunimi couldn’t deny that it kept things interesting around base.

“There’s something wrong?” he prompted, when Kindaichi’s usual fumbling was replaced by furious tapping. Kunimi poked the packet with his foot again. “Should I take it with me? It doesn’t look big. I could probably surface—”

“ _No,”_ Kindaichi’s response was immediate. And harsh. Damn. “I can’t confirm packet content even though you’re looking right at the it. I don’t,” he scrubbed at his face; Kunimi heard him sign over the line. “I don’t— _understand._ It’s like someone’s weaponized their own consciousness.”

Kunimi squinted. He was no tether but that did sound to him like supremely bad news. “That’s not possible.”

“I _know_ it’s not possible,” more typing—angrier this time. “I can’t get access into rote memory or the basic limbic systems or—”

Kunimi waved him away. He squatted down, putting his lenses a little closer to the packet itself. Then he surprised everyone by consulting his timer appropriately for first time in three myriad, probably. “You’ve still got ten minutes, Yuutaro,” he said. Added: “Don’t panic.”

Kindaichi managed a snort. He was in on the paranoia jokes as much as anyone else. “Sure,” he said, only half-distracted over the comms. “I’m moving you now. Getting as much juice out of it before you unplug.”

Kunimi’s world spun as Kindaichi manipulated the interface from his computers. Kunimi gave up on squatting and put his ass down after a minute and a half, stretched his legs out on either side of the packet by the third, and was contemplating ritual suicide by the eighth, when Kindaichi inhaled so sharply over the line that it startled him awake.

“Akira,” he said, and there was genuine fear in his voice. Kunimi had known Kindaichi a long time—longer than most Academy recruits—but he'd never heard him like this before. “You have to get out of there,” he said. “Something’s wrong, I can’t get a grip on—”

And then his voice fried out. 

Uh. Fuck.

“Yuutaro?” Kunimi hazarded.

There was no reply. Kunimi backed up from the packet in front of him. He’d been three years in the professional circuits, and he’d never lost Kindaichi on a drop before. What had been a melting pot of analytics began to glitch out his lens, and if he wasn’t so afraid of losing his physical connection to base, he would’ve dropped Kindaichi altogether, but the impending migraine was the least of his concerns, because his tether had told him to bounce, and so Kunimi Akira was motherfucking bouncing.

_::that we’ve nearly cleared all the Festoon Trident by now::I’m not sure if you’re still keeping tabs on me, but it feels like you are::there was this guy I saw, bar on Station G118, and he kind of reminded me of you—had big earrings and eight eyes and about thirty incisors—okay so I guess he didn’t remind me exactly of you, but it felt like you were him, there, watching me::knowing me::making me think about—you, I guess, or us::and I know Oikawa still blames me, which is fine, I defected, and that’s not really a blow one can recover from::in the emotional sense (does the commander have emotions?) or the professional::but, just for the record, I still think it’s unwise that against all odds you don’t::_

“What the fuck?” Oikawa said. The crew watched as Iwaizumi walked in a tiny bitch of a circle onscreen, Oikawa’s hands gripped white and bony against the console edge. “It was just here,” he snarled. “It was _just here.”_

“I know,” Kunimi said.

Oikawa wasn’t looking at him. “But that’s impossible,” he said. He reached for his tablet. “There has to be a mistake. Kunimi, are you sure—”

“I’m sure,” he said. Kindaichi was sleeping off the scare, so he couldn’t attest to the details, but Kunimi didn’t need him to. He was sure. And besides, even his footprints had been immortalized in the datastream’s tilebed. Iwaizumi was dutifully tracing them with his own, even toeing at the assmarks that Kunimi had left behind, but the spot where someone’s packet had been had disappeared entirely. No trails, no smoke, no flowbits that an interface could follow.

“It’s like they completely unplugged their consciousness from the stream,” Iwaizumi said. “I don’t…think,” he kicked the air. Nothing stopped him. “Yeah. No cloaking. They’re gone.”

 _“Impossible,”_ Oikawa hissed, more to himself than anyone else present. He was leaning so far forward his nose was nearly touching the screen. “That’s non-viable. _Entirely non-viable_ , Hajime. You can’t just— _unplug your consciousness from the stream—”_

“Only happens when someone dies, I know,” Iwaizumi replied, ever the saint of patience.

Oikawa muttered something unrepeatable.

Iwaizumi continued. “Even then, Tooru, I’ve never heard of a packet translocating,” he said, turning around in another little circle. “The fact that it’s presence is wiped, too…that’s not,” he hedged. “It’s not—safe here. This isn’t—whoever’s capable of this could bring the whole grid down in seconds if they wanted to.”

Oikawa worked his lip. As usual, Iwaizumi was right. He was currently standing in the well-trodden capstone of a webby mess of fourteen-something systems, meaning that, even if the topical channel produced no trails, at least six others would’ve had leftovers for him packet home, but whoever uploaded and then deleted ( _erased, destroyed, eliminated—_ Kunimi’s brain supplied helpfully) this wasn’t the calibre of their usual targets.

Oikawa sighed, thumbed at his brow. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Pull out, Hajime, please. We need to brief on this.”

Iwaizumi nodded. “Okay, hold on, I’ll—”

“Wait,” Kunimi said. “Commander.” Something cold stroked down his spine. He reached out, enlarged the lens reading on the screen. “There’s something there,” he said.

They watched as Iwaizumi moved on the monitor. His collar shuffled over the mic. When he next spoke, his voice chilled Kunimi all the way through. “Oh, I see what you mean,” he said. It took him a minute to resurface from the tilebed, something clutched to his chest.

Kunimi leaned in, tried to see what he was holding, when the grid lights began to click off.

Oikawa was the first to recover. He snapped: “ _Move, Hajime.”_

Iwaizumi did not contradict the order. He stuffed the codex into his transfer pack and fucking legged it. The monitor visuals were nothing but a blur of motion sickness as he bounced through the datastream levels, his tether readouts wavering dangerously—glitching, overheating, the console heating all the way up to a whine even under Oikawa’s command. “Bridge, I can’t jump,” he said. And then: “Oh my fucking god, Tooru, I can’t jump.”

Oikawa’s hands flew over the keypad. “Hold on,” he said. The firewalls came up and nearly decapitated his offhand. “I’m going to force the lift from my end, Hajime,” he said, and rested one hand on the attaché by his elbow. He warned: “It’s gonna hurt.”

Iwaizumi barked a laugh. “Better than death by grid immolation,” he said. The stream was a ruthless place to die. “Punch it,” he said. 

_::you’ll have seen it by now, Kunimi::I know because you’re the ones who found us first, which was the unholy mother of all fucking surprises to everyone but Kenma, I think::I’m sorry it had to be you::because moving forward I only see one way it ends, even though I guess—we…already cauterized that wound::but it means you’ll get to see me scared::isn’t that what you always wanted::and just one more thing before you’re set to hunt me down, don’t you think it’s still::_

Iwaizumi snapped back so fast into his body that he rolled himself off the cryocot and onto the floor with a spectacular spray of vomit. There was blood in his bile, and probably going to be blood in his piss and blood in his shit for the next myriad if he was lucky _,_ but he probably was, seeing as Oikawa was the best in the tether business, and he’d been running drops with Iwaizumi since the two of them slid from the bosom womb and bonded on the sweet teat of love.

One of the dusters came and mopped up the debris, its six wheels whirring as it finished up with the sanitizer and disappeared from the bridge. Its head bobbed politely as it rolled off in the direction of the waste chutes.

Oikawa was already helping Iwaizumi sit up by then, dabbing gently at the blood that was coming out of his nose with a frivolous old world hanky. He refused to let Iwaizumi move, so the general ended up sitting there with a bloody tissue in one hand and Iwaizumi in the middle of a brief despite his blocked nose on the other, looking like someone had just put him through the high cycle of the gyrotread, sprawled out on the floor of the bridge with bloodshot eyes, several leaking orifices, and a limp wrist.

“Tooru, Tooru, look,” Iwaizumi said, as impatiently as he could. He looked a wrong push from passing out entirely, but he still brought out the codex—gleaming wing thin under the light. “It’s shifting. I thought—down there, I thought it was a malform, but I didn’t have time to check—”

Oikawa took the sphere from him. It trilled light and lovely. Codebits revolved around its glass core. There was a band of silver that crossed its midline, splitting it into uneven thirds. Even to Kunimi’s technologically obtuse eye, it was truly and undeniably beautiful, because it looked exactly like an apparatus that Kageyama Tobio had built.

**_& HAILING THE GENERAL OIKAWA, TOORU, 8STAR12HAND OF THE BLUE CASTLE WARMAKER, Q.FED. SEKTOR, 401.552.01_ **

**_∆ ∆ dont bother_ ** _w/ the pleasantries we just wanted to drop by and say thank you and hello ∆ ∆some of us weren’t exactly expecting U but it was a happy surprise∆ ∆we thought i’d take much longer to get that deep into the federation sectors_ _øø_ _but it seems like tobios work is_ _øø_ _solid like U promised_

 _& ∆ ∆we did read his updated file_ _øø_ _yes the one U thought U all hid so well after his execution_

_& ∆ ∆4 ur information we’re headed for white castle next, if they’re not already gone &∆ ∆ green’s great towers fell like thunder last night _

_& ∆ ∆didn’t U say we were just HOLLOW STARS ???_

**_hugs &kisses&remembrance that the walker walks among U and us and all in-between;_ **

_moonkid + CO._

Being executed wasn’t a very pleasant experience, though Kageyama technically couldn’t attest to the dying bit. It’d been a surprise to wake up on a cruiser coming out of sleepstatis, wondering if the afterlife was another set of cruisers he’d be corralled into service thereupon, and trying not to remember the exact angle that Kunimi’s blade had gone in through his heart and afterwards left him for dead.

He didn’t stabilize until the end of two solar, meaning that Tsukishima had helpfully suggested, no less than fifteen times a day, that Kageyama should be tossed out the airlock as dead weight. The Lord Walker originally wanted him for his hands, but put Kageyama in a room with parts and daughterboards, fuck myriad budget; he couldn’t do jack shit. His mind came up empty, his hands even worse. A couple of the tethers tried to dip him into the datastream, but Kageyama howled and kicked himself bloody if he ever went near that thing, so his commanders learned early on to leave him alone in case he tried to throw himself out the airlock before Tsukishima did.

Things got better once he met Hinata. He and Hoshiumi were the only people who didn’t mind Kageyama’s silences—they each talked enough for three—though Kenma also put up best with Kageyama’s inherent peculiarities, and never pushed him for more than he offered.

Hinata was a walker, and Hoshiumi was a walker, but the two of them worked as a unit which Kageyama never managed to make heads or tails of. There was something a little loony about those two, which was well enough; Kageyama supposed there was something a little loony about _all_ the hands of the Hollow Stars, which rendered his psychosis entirely jejune; combing space as a set of intergalactic outlaws was not a job that routinely endeared itself to the mentally stable.

Time was always hard for Kageyama, so he could only estimate it to the degree of maybe the third or fourth solar before he felt the need to go to lab. He always built beneath the high workbench because he thought it safer there, better to feel the hum of the engines rote and shackled; he’d even complained about the lights, but Tsukishima had laughed him all the way out of the service room.

He often worked undisturbed, with Kenma as his first and most frequent visitor. Kageyama was so absorbed in his task that first time they met—doing his best to reconfigure circuitboards to fit a sleeker design, that he didn’t notice his Lord Walker until he had come to sit next to him on the floor. And when he did, he had choked and started, voice garbled—grotesque—in his scarred throat. The mag-googles he’d commandeered for himself, still a half a size too large for his emaciated skull, slid awkwardly down his face.

Kenma merely waited for him to quiet down. “What are you building?” he asked.

Kageyama flushed hard. “Um,” he said. His voice came slow and limping. His vocal chords had been reattached, on the most part, but operating a slit throat was typically considered moot. Kageyama could talk, but it was a struggle. “Want to—try.”

Kenma was unperturbed. “Redesigning our caretakers?”

Kageyama flushed again. Sweat beaded a little at his temples. “Y…es,” he said. “Was bulky.”

Kenma prodded a severed wheel. “Bulky,” he agreed, with no little amusement. He poked at the chassis next. “I agree,” he said. Added: “Wasn’t my design.”

Kageyama had never been in on the jokes with the other Hollow Stars—with anyone really—so he went hot all over under his clothes every time he was looked at, Kenma no exception. It was an uncomfortable feeling, but he didn’t know how to tell the captain to leave him alone without possibly inviting death, which meant he suffered the occasional attempt at eye contact with all the skulls by his knees chattering happily away.

Kenma never mentioned the madness, which Kageyama was grateful for. He never stayed long either. He’d only recently begun some strange ritual of touching fingers to Kageyama’s cold cheek before leaving, a little mouthful of the intimacy he shared with the other stars, which never failed to still all the hands that bubbled up from beneath the floor to harass Kageyama’s skin. It was no different this time.

Kageyama waited until his Lord was gone before finishing up the maintenance rounds. It took only an hour or so before he set the caretakers off down the hall and he stood to tidy after himself. Clutching at his canvas toolkit, he took the route back to his quarters as quick as he dared, head down, bad leg dragging. When he clattered onto his bunk, he shuddered all over with relief, feeling like the eyes on him muffled in this place—womblike with white noise.

Kageyama curled up foetal in the blankets he’d dragged to a pile on the floor, knowing himself weak and shamed with it but unable to stop. Because the soldier from Blue Castle he’d been was dead; their best man had killed him, and out of his fetid corpse crawled out a pitiable child, parasitic and cowardly, his clever hands reduced, his clever mouth reduced, everything, in entire, about him reduced. Subtract any more, Kageyama thought, and he would end up nothing at all: just a vacuum to mark him, the corpse of a collapsed star like a black hole.

_::and I say, it’s not easy to miss you, Kunimi::because being with you hurt and being without you hurt and we must have fought more than we fucked at the end, or just about the same::and you killed me because you loved me::and I let you kill me because I loved you::and I get it, I do, I really do::because making love is not the same as understanding it::_

Federation invested a limited mount of warm bodies in their sniper program at a time; politically mandated assassins were as much migraine as they were asset, so the 10STAR12HAND’ed few preferred to muffle the status of their cadet pulls, meaning that nobody was supposed to know about the details of Kunimi’s rank until he graduated to solo work. Peril hands were few and far between. They worked alone, and started young, and bit the bullet in increasingly inventive ways. But Oikawa knew how to pull strings like nobody’s business, and so the dying breed of Blue Castle had snagged Kunimi before the man himself even realized what was going on.

Ergo, Kunimi was good at some things, very good at others, but preferred to keep the _killing people_ aspect of his CV off public radar. But things didn't always stay that way.

After Oikawa had been hailed by the Hollow Stars, and two sister ships had fallen with a bang and a whimper, Red Castle disappeared from all nav like the packet Kunimi had found, and Silver’s bridge command had hustled to Seijoh’s dock for council briefing under the Federation flag. With the handsome and noble offhand Iwaizumi on his right, and the black tar of Kunimi on his left, 8HAND12STAR General Oikawa Tooru of the Blue Castle Warmaker saw in his colleagues of war in the cardinal wing. Then they proceeded to engage in an hours long squabble that saw only half the breakable items in the room broken. It was, all in all, a promising start to a new alliance.

“So you’re telling me,” Bokuto said, leaned back far enough in his chair that he might’ve toppled over at any moment. “That the _Kozume Kenma_ is still out there kicking somewhere.”

Akaashi stole his cigarette. “Didn’t he get blown to bits during the Trident skirmish?” he said. Bokuto, where he was fidgeting nicely next to him, looked at Akaashi like he wanted to swallow his tether whole; he was so fucking hard for him it was a little embarrassing. “I could’ve sworn I saw his eyes being auctioned off last solar.”

Oikawa didn’t reply, just leaned forward and rolled them Tobio’s codex.

Bokuto regarded it like a bomb.

Akaashi poked it with his cigarette. “Hm,” he said. Added thoughtfully: “Those might have been his eyes.”

Oikawa nodded. “The Lord Kozume is still out there with the rest of his Hands. I am not joking about war.”

Bokuto stole his cigarette back from Akaashi, and smoked it furiously. “We know nothing of their numbers, Oikawa,” he said, after a long moment’s contemplation. He rubbed at his cheek. “They are black space to our democratic light. Resurrections and trapped spirits. That’s a whole _tower_ of walkers you want to destroy, and you know as well as I that they don’t die so easy the second time around.”

Oikawa’s jaw was set. “They took one of our children, Bokuto. I want to bring him home.”

Kunimi almost laughed. He lit up to cover the noise.

The general's last order regarding Kageyama were execution.

The command kept on, but Kunimi felt like tuning out, so he did, busied with sucking smoke through his teeth and brooding long about that last assignment of his. Kageyama hadn't even seen Kunimi coming before the knife had gone through his back.

What a gods damned pitiful death, he thought. What a gods damned pitiful child.

“Look—” Bokuto was still trying to talk sense into him. “You wake the walkers, and we’re doomed.”

“They’re already awake,” Oikawa countered. “And they’re probably coming for us next. At this rate, they’ll wipe out the entire rainbow before the council stops squabbling over the Wayreach provinces and surprises us all by doing something useful for once.”

Akaashi said: “But how can we fight them, General? Reasonably, please. Even if we outnumber the Hands, the fact that they can walk in the stream with no tether makes them each worth a hundred soldier,” he said. “Every Hollow Star does something different, surely, but the baseline is that they can disappear in the data grid at the drop of a hat, and we never know when they’ll next resurface. We’ve never seen the brow of their plans until half the crews had died.”

Oikawa was silent.

Akaashi pressed his case. “Their plays are unique. The Lord tailors them each,” he said, and spread his hands out in front of him. “That is not a risk I can, in good faith, take. You must know this.”

Iwaizumi rose to the bait. “Then what would you suggest, Akaashi?”

His eye shot to Kunimi, where the lieutenant was slumped torpid by the wall.

Oikawa’s mouth opened halfway in protest.

It took him a moment. He couldn't get the words out in the right order.

“You,” his voice pitched. “You want to face them one-on-one?" he said. "And take out all the Hands of Hollow Stars _with perils?”_

Bokuto might have been Silver Castle’s commander, but its greatest intelligence lay with Akaashi. He was an unconventional architect with a sparkling track record, but Kunimi was afraid that the poor 8STAR12HAND General Oikawa Tooru of the Blue Castle Warmaker could only take so much stress on his sad old heart before it gave out entirely.

He wailed. He thrashed. He suffered apoplexy. His offhand, the commander Iwaizumi, patted him on the shoulder as Kunimi rose like a resurrected saint to offer his general a smoke. But Oikawa was busy in the throes of his wounded self, and ignored them both. The others looked faintly amused at his theatrics.

In the end, Kunimi was the only one who noticed the light out of everyone in the room, because it was his job to notice such things. And the light was Kageyama’s.

He dropped his cigarette, and he dove for the first man he could reach before his brain had registered what exactly his body was doing. Kunimi had just managed to drag Iwaizumi’s confused head into the cradle of his arms when Tobio’s little codex picked up heat and light and sound and touch and burst outwards in a scream of color like the last dredges of a bitter supernova compressed into the brittle skin of blue glass.

_::I wish I could say I was sorry for the collateral, but I’m not as good a person as you, Kunimi::I was always so angry, except I never knew what to call it::although I think you might have because::you hated me this long::and that helps you learn someone from the atoms up I think::and if I'm being honest, it's always been an eye for an eye::_

Kageyama Tobio was the Federation’s favorite whipping boy. He graduated early from the Academy and was sent straight to service on a warmaker—none of that bullshit peddling cargo for seven solar before taking on semi-decent promotion for board—and ate his way through five stars, probationary status on the sixth, before the vessel he’d fought with was captured in hostile territory. He spent his coming-of-age as a particularly miserable PoW; it was only after negotiations had finally worked themselves out did the Neon insurgents send the Federation’s wunderboy home in four separate pieces with the head still attached.

Kageyama hadn’t died then, because Federation poured their bottomless funding into surgeries and rehabilitation, still eager to use whatever was left of him in battle. And although he was up and walking on his own within a handful of myriad, he was declared clinically insane. And, _holy shit,_ he was absolutely motherfucking psychotic.

Kageyama never explained what it was he put up with in enemy camp, but it clearly wasn’t good, seeing as he was dismembered with medical alacrity—amputations at the hip and shoulders—and then shipped to neutral airspace in an old world coffin, left to drift in the carcass of the dead cruiser he’d commanded before capture.

In the end, the board sanctioned drugging him up to serve under Oikawa’s direct command, which was the worst place Kageyama could’ve been restationed, seeing as it took him a total of three sentences before he became the laughingstock of Blue Castle.

Kunimi met Kageyama for the first time when Oikawa was busy shoving his fist into the poor kid’s face. Kageyama crumpled like he’d been shot, an apt reaction—Oikawa punched like a brick wall—but a humiliating one, as the blow had broken his very breakable nose, which was spurting blood like a lab faucet, an event which Oikawa observed with particularly vindictive satisfaction.

Eventually Kageyama got himself dismissed, the other officers in the lab at the time had carefully turned their faces away from the demonstration, and Kunimi watched sotto voce as Kageyama limped his way out the doors and into the lesser used cargoways down to his quarters.

Their second meeting had been after one of Kunimi’s assignments. He was in the middle of peeling himself out of airlock when they ran into each other.

They froze.

Kunimi was not of the habit of discussing his work. Beyond Oikawa and Iwaizumi, only Kindaichi knew for sure what assignments he ran when everyone else at Blue Castle was asleep, though the others probably put out their guesses by now. Kunimi was still covered in dirt and gore, and Kageyama looked fresh from a beating, and as the night cycle lights washed over them both in their basest, barest, and most contemptible selves, something a little like sympathy dragged nails down Kunimi's chest and burned hot in him thereafter.

“Are you headed to lab?” Kunimi asked. He didn’t know why. “You’re not supposed to be there after shift hours.”

Kageyama looked uncomfortable. “I have clearance from command,” he said. He didn’t look Kunimi in the eye. “I need to finish—um, new mission apparatus.” _No wonder he’s such a joke around here,_ Kunimi thought. He didn’t have the same bulk as a soldier on active roster, but he still had his height, and that _face_ of his, gods; there were so many things that contradicted each other in looks alone that he could be nothing but a Federation farce. “Sorry to bother you.”

Kunimi’s hand shot out and caught him by the elbow.

“Let me walk you there,” he said.

Kageyama’s expression shuttered hard.

Kunimi’s head tipped. “No?”

Kageyama glanced away. “You don’t want to be seen with me,” he said.

“I don’t care.”

He sneered, but it was a little sad. “I don’t need your pity, Lieutenant.”

Kunimi didn’t miss a beat. “Not even to watch you work?” he asked. It was the wrong thing to say. Kageyama’s expression twisted. He added: “I heard you’re the best architect on this side of the Rim.”

Kageyama made a noise that was too harsh to be considered a laugh. “Don't put too much stock in the gossip around here,” he said, and some of the stupefaction must have shown on Kunimi’s face, because Kageyama put distance between them almost immediately. He turned his back to Kunimi, just a little, and said: “People tend to get the wrong ideas about things, is all.”

_::the time you’re reading this, I’ll either be dead by your hand again, or disappeared::I’m sorry I can’t even let you put up a chase::but before I go I just wanted to say that::I’m sorry about Bokuto and Akaashi::and I’m real motherfucking sorry about Iwaizumi::but when the devil comes to lock me in the same cage as that bastard Oikawa, I'll regret nothing except maybe not being able to see you one last time::_

“Something’s scared him,” Oikawa said, peeved. He couldn’t get the doors to Kageyama’s room open.

“Yes,” Iwaizumi bit, angrier with him than usual. “ _You._ ”

Oikawa scoffed. “Hajime,” he said, and his tone was only slightly condescending. “I haven’t even spoken to the boy since—”

“—you beat the living daylights out of him in a cohort meeting, I know. Don’t be coy with me.”

Oikawa sobered hard. “He was out of line. He should know it’s not protocol appropriate to be talking back to superiors—”

“Yes, and then what?” Iwaizumi snapped. “You discipline him publicly? And with excessive violence—”

“— _fuck you_ , so I might have lost my temper—”

“—how the hell else are you going to explain why you’re letting this behavior slide? You’re twenty-six and the direct superior to an architect with Kageyama’s credentials and the youngest peril to have graduated the program intact in the history of the fourth generation, but you’re still playing gossip games like we’re third years on the exam track _with your subordinates_ —”

“—such flowering deference, Commander—”

“—the hell, Tooru? Where did your self-respect go? I thought you were a better man than this.”

Kageyama sat and shook, his hands balled bloody together in his lap. He was he pushed up hard against the corner of the room, better to escape the sounds of argument outside his door—violent, explosive argument—and as if in response, the eyes stared at him through the walls frothed and madly roved.

Kageyama was afraid, though not unaware of his own insanity. At night, he heard not the sound of his own heartbeat, but of fire, and sometimes he did not understand human speech, and couldn’t remember where he was, or what he was meant to be doing. And now, the heads of dead men lined themselves up in neat rows beneath his bunk to show off their sunken colorful ghastly eyes, their bloated tongues, lolled between their teeth like pulled taffy.

It started back in his prison days on Neon. Kageyama had been forced to watch the beheading of his two hundred men for half a solar, the tears and bile coming out like galaxy's end where he'd been chained to the observation chair. What came afterwards was not any easier to swallow, but he'd somehow still thought himself alright until the sleeplessness came and turned him into a beast that frothed and roved and required limbs withheld just to keep him down; it was only later when the sedatives ran away did he realize he’d forgotten how go to bed to die in the night, swearing up and down the halls that there were still bits of dead bone all over his skin instead.

“Are they always like this?” Kunimi asked. They sat next to each other on the floor.

Kageyama looked away from the skulls. Nobody could see what Kageyama could see, so Kunimi probably meant the general. It took a while for him to remember speech. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe.”

“They’re fighting over you like a dog with a bone.”

Kageyama shuddered at the imagery. His head crooked to the side, ticking there.

Kunimi didn’t seem perturbed. “You’re bleeding again,” he said. His voice was low enough that Kageyama couldn’t guess the emotion behind it. He pointed to Kageyama’s arms. “Don’t pick at your scabs, okay?”

Kageyama took his hands out of his lap. “Okay.”

It was not always hard for him to do what he was told. Focused instead on the screaming, faint as it was, that issued up through the floorboards. Kageyama spent one minute forgetting speech, and then the next forgetting breath and the function of his lungs. Air whistled unpleasantly through his teeth. He shifted and shifted again, unused to having both arms and both legs. Two too many. It—

“Tobio,” Kunimi said, surprising him.

Kageyama paused on the question of how he might get rid of his leg, it hurt like hell when the insurgents had sawed it off in Neon, but he was starting now to see reason for removing it again.

“S…orry,” Kageyama said, and looked up just as Kunimi moved to fix his hair for him. Some caught a little on Kageyama’s aid—perched as a line of perfect, graceless skeleton following the curve of his ear—as Kageyama flushed hard. He hadn’t been this close to anyone else in nearly ten solar, and the proximity was doing a number to his cognition. The skulls underneath his bed chattered, then fell silent.

Kageyama wanted to lean away, but Kunimi wouldn’t let him. He was all but on top of him now. Kunimi was so beautiful and so elegant and always so impossible to read: a study in control. Of course Kageyama was hopeless over him.

“Don’t look at them,” Kunimi said, and brought his other hand up to pinch Kageyama’s chin. He swiveled his numb head away from where he’d been staring assiduously beneath his bed, and brought Kageyama’s eyes to his. “Eyes on me, Tobio, that’s it.”

Kageyama’s stomach dropped. “N—how did you—”

“They’re in your files.”

Kageyama didn’t know what to say. One of the ghosts laughed, then screamed, then laughed again. Bones crawled beneath his clothes. The eyes on the wall opposite stretched and bulged with blood. A few of them burst, leaking discharge over the floor.

Kageyama’s throat worked. It was so hard to think. He said: “But you don’t think—?”

Kunimi’s eyes this close looked, maybe, a little bit sad. “No, I don’t,” he said, his pretty mouth turned down at the corners, a moue of unhappiness. He stroked Kageyama’s temple, one thumb pressed gently to the corner of his bloodshot eyes. “You’re doing just fine, Tobio,” he said softly, to the disappearance of roving eyes and frothing skulls and the death trying to crawl up and over into Kageyama’s skin. He was a lighthouse in black waters, his voice like a lullaby. “I think you’re doing just fine.”

_::and isn’t it the strangest thing? I can’t live without you::so I’ve made a real game of it—reconstructing your eyes, which stare, and your mouth, which moves, and your hands, which kiss, and your voice, which is kind::_

_::you’re not stupid, but you are sometimes just so stupid about me::stop chasing us, please::even if it’s for Blue Castle vengeance::even if it’s because you held Iwaizumi as he bled out on that ship::you wouldn't be able to put a bullet in my brain no matter how much you hate me or how hard you try::because you’re kind, Akira::_

_::because you’re really, really kind::_

Somewhere in the bowels of a dead blue warmaker—three thousand lightyears away from where Kageyama’s ship drifted under the captaincy of the Hollow Lord Kozume—keeping no company but corpses, Kunimi Akira deadened the red muscle of his heart in preparation for his last kill.

**Author's Note:**

> another fic in the bag wherein upon finishing i sit back in my chair and wonder when i will let two characters kiss before either one or both of them dies tragically offscreen
> 
> thanks again to [elo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fatal) for continuously enabling bad oswin behavior
> 
> if you have questions about the terminology let me know! other than that, thank you SOOOOOO much for reading !!!!! u can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/gonkisses) if you want (not recommended)


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